Shelf Reflection: Bastian Fox Phelan

Shelf Reflection is a monthly series where we explore the bookshelves and reading habits of our featured First Book Club authors.

This month’s reflection is from Bastian Fox Phelan, whose debut memoir How To Be Between (Giramondo) is an exploration of youthful anxiety, medical discourse and shifting identities. Read Ellen Cregan’s review, and stay tuned for more on our website and podcast later in the month!

What are you currently reading?

A few things—In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane, and two audiobooks, Omar Sakr’s Son of Sin and Kaya Wilson’s As Beautiful As Any Other.

In the Margins is a slim book of essays reflecting on Ferrante’s writing practice and reading habits. I heard about it in The Conversation. It has been difficult to fit in reading lately, as I just had a baby. This book is the perfect length (and weight—it’s hard to hold a book one-handed while feeding a baby). I loved the Neapolitan Novels, Frantumaglia, The Lying Life of Adults, and her interviews and essays. I’m saving her earlier works for later on. Whenever I read Ferrante it feels like something inside me shifts. They disturb me, and the disturbance is the urge to be a better writer.

She writes: ‘Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up.’ In my memoir about identity between the binaries, I tried to do something like this.

What kind of reader are you?

I often have several books on the go, unless one grabs me and I can’t put it down. Occasionally I start reading something that’s so good I abandon it a few pages in. That happened with A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector. Early on, she writes:

I’m afraid to write. It’s so dangerous. Anyone who’s tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things—and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others—Which? maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.

When I read this I was at the start of a two-day journey to Nantucket (prompted by reading another book, Melville’s Moby-Dick). I put the book down and stared out of the window for the rest of the trip. I was afraid to read more. Maybe I was afraid of its power.

Occasionally I start reading something that’s so good I abandon it a few pages in…Maybe I was afraid of its power.

I don’t often re-read, but Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Patti Smith’s Just Kids are ones I’ve returned to. They gave me an idea of the kind of memoir I wanted to write: a warm, accessible künstlerroman—a story about becoming an artist. I love those stories, even if they’re romanticised and sentimental. They’re good stories.

I will freely admit that I like reading astrology and self-help books. Some that I’ve enjoyed and found useful are Jan Spiller’s Astrology for the Soul, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, The Courage to be Disliked, and The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up (I still fold my socks the way Marie Kondo teaches). If a book can offer you a new perspective on life, or prompt you to learn more about yourself and your relationships, then it’s worth reading.

I go through phases of reading a lot and reading very little. I used to pride myself on not binge watching TV shows—that’s changed since having a baby. For the first six weeks I was stuck at home. I got through a lot of Netflix series and now I can say I understand the pleasures of watching TV. But there’s also nothing better than a quiet night on the couch with your loved one, reading side-by-side, with no obligation to share, just the knowledge that you’re both enjoying the private world you enter through your imagination, until one or both of you fall asleep.

There’s nothing better than a quiet night on the couch with your loved one, reading side-by-side, with no obligation to share.

What does your book collection look like?

The books I tend to keep are old paperbacks with a lot of character, new books that made a significant impact on me, and new books that I want to read but haven’t read yet—the latter being about half my collection. If I have a book on my shelf for two years without reading it I move it on. Likewise with new books that I enjoyed but don’t need to hang on to. The desire to purchase yet another book persists, so I have to make decisions about what to let go of.

During the 2021 lockdown my husband organised his books by colour and size. The result was aesthetically pleasing, so I copied him. Our dining table in our apartment was right near the bookshelves and after re-organising, I would sit and look at the books and feel like all was well in the world, despite it being very far from that.

Earlier this year when we moved house, my mother did the unpacking while I sat around being very pregnant. We had a lot to do, so the books ended up getting stacked on the shelves in a chaotic arrangement. Mine and Carlin’s books mixed together, books stacked both vertically and horizontally, the contemporary literature next to the birth books next to the old picture books we keep for making zines. I thought we would rearrange things once we’d settled in, but after the baby arrived I realised I barely had time to shower, let alone organise books.

I thought that I’d re-organise the shelves as part of writing this column, so I’d have a nice, neat little story to tell. I started pulling books off the shelves and trying to remember how they were before: my books were grouped into genres like memoir, poetry, new fiction, classics. Then I encountered a new chaotic element: mildew. All the rain over the past few months has made my furniture start to grow mould, including the book case. I started googling dehumidifiers instead of sorting books, then I became overwhelmed, then it was back to baby duty. I left the bookshelves in greater disarray than when I’d begun. Not a very good story. I like putting things in order. It satisfies the systematic aspects of my brain. I think that’s why I like writing. But in real life, chaos tends to win.

What books did you found critical to the writing of your own book?

There’s no map to follow when writing a book because every book is different. That sense of being overwhelmed by disorder used to come up when I was writing, especially in the early days. I was working part time and doing a Masters by Research full time. I would have one or two days a week to just write, but I struggled to find a routine.

However I did take comfort in the approach to writing that Hemingway describes in A Moveable Feast. This book provided me with good principles to follow, like writing until just before you run out of steam, and walking or reading afterwards so you stop thinking about your work. Replenishing yourself in art and dreams.

I like putting things in order. I think that’s why I like writing. But in real life, chaos tends to win.

Another book that was critical to my thinking was Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s anthology Nobody Passes. I love how the essays blow apart the whole concept of passing, of needing to be recognised as a coherent identity in order to be safe, loved, accepted. As someone who has often felt on the margins (even within queer spaces) this book was comforting, and later it made me realise that I didn’t have to try to simplify issues of identity to tell a good story—in fact, the opposite could be true. That a good story often presents ambiguities without trying to resolve them. Even just that concept, nobody passes, everyone feels inadequate or out of place in certain circumstances—I think this is illuminating and very humanising.

What book/s are you constantly recommending other people read?

After the 2020 bushfires I read Fire Country by Victor Steffensen. I wanted to know more about Indigenous land management, and Steffensen’s book was a great introduction. His writing helped me feel some hope after the devastation we’d witnessed, and it reinforced that the devastation had begun long before the fires, with colonisation and the dispossession of First Nations peoples. Steffensen shows how fire can heal Country and people, and advocates for a new approach to land management led by First Nations people and their knowledge of Country. I started recommending this book to people in the wake of the fires.

If you had to pick one book to live in for the rest of your life, which would it be?

I would like to live inside Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea. It’s a field guide to three kinds of coastal ecosystems: rocky shores, sandy beaches and coral coasts. The field guide is much more than that, though. Her writing is so tender and her attention to the life cycles of the most minute creatures is both scientific and devotional. I would like to live inside her mind as she explored these environments. This book was the reason I became intrigued by rock pools a few years ago. It helped me to see in a way I’d never seen before, and to me, that’s the difference between a pleasurable reading experience and a transformative one.

What’s next for you?

Celebrating the release of my debut memoir, How to Be Between, with friends and family. Keri Glastonbury is launching it in Mulubinba Newcastle on 8 June and Maeve Marsden is launching it in Sydney on 21 June. I’ll also be continuing work on my PhD, which is an eco memoir about engaging with local ecology through citizen science. The first chapter, about exploring rock pools during the first lockdown in 2020, was published by Sydney Review of Books.

How To Be Between is available now from your local independent bookseller.